Road Trip!!!

I am going on a road trip. On May 1st to the 4th Karen and I are heading out to Calgary. I had been tossing around the idea in my head of going to Calgary to visit my grandpa for a while. I was thinking that even if I went by myself for a weekend sometime it wouldn't be too bad. I mentioned my idea to Karen one day and she said "I'LL GO!" And the idea of a road trip was born.

Karen and I have talked about doing a road trip before, we even had one almost planned a couple of years ago, but then Arleen had to drop out because of work, and Karen and I were too chicken to go to Edmonton on our own. I have to admit that after navigating around Calgary for Jason last summer I feel MUCH more confident going there. I have never driven in Calgary. I have only ever been a passenger, so this could be fun :)

Our plan is to do some shopping, visit my grandpa, do some more shopping and eat good food. We are planning to go to the Cheesecake Cafe. Jay and I went last summer and it was quite yummy! I booked our hotel this evening. I found a pretty decent looking hotel for $104/night, which with taxes works out to about $114/night. It looks MUCH nicer than the dump Jay and I stayed in last summer for $150/night :P

I am pretty pumped about this whole thing :) Girls weekend! Woooooo!

Quote of the evening

We went to my sister's house for supper this evening as it is James's 5th birthday today. We had a good visit and my nephew Will is quite the little turkey. He will be three in July and is talking up quite a storm. He also whines a lot, sort of reminds me of me when I was a kid, haha.

Anyway, this evening we were talking about some of the funny things that come out of Will's mouth. When I was babysitting them about a month ago, when James was playing Wii boxing Will would be shouting "Punch him in the weeeiner!!" I had to laugh. Coming out of the mouth of a 2 year old. Tonight I was mentioning that to my sister and Will oveheard and said,

"Uncle Jason is the only one here with a weeeiner."

Yup, out of the mouths of babes...

Poo

I had quite the laugh this morning about Kiwi's poo. If you don't want to hear about a poo story you should probably stop reading now. I have read enough 'mom' blogs though, to know that obviously people enjoy reading/writing about other children's bathroom habits.

Ever since Kiwi was little, when it was time to poo, she would go and sniff around and assume her poo stance, and go, but she would be in her poo stance and while she was pooing she would keep walking and sniffing. I call it her poop walk. This morning what made me laugh is she was sniffing and sniffing around and there was a piece of poo hanging out, but she wasn't in her poo stance yet. She was just walking around looking for the right place to go but was already 'going', haha. Not sure if you find that funny, but I sure did :)

Sigh

It is not cancer. Four of the sweetest words I could have heard today. I was at work so I didn't hoot and holler as much as I might have otherwise, but I have never felt such relief. It has been three of the most stressful weeks of my life. Jay was saying tonight that in his life that this will probably stand out as one of the three most stressful times in his life. The other two being his accident and marrying me....haha, no.....the other was waiting to find out if the financing would go through so we could get into our house on the possession date. That was a super stressful week! I would say for me the ones that stand out the most are the financing on the house, Jay's bout with infection and Kiwi's health scare. If I had to narrow it down to three.....

The surgeon said he is not completely sure why she has lumps, and they may still need to be removed, but it doesn't appear that they are life threatening. He said he would consult with some of his peers and give us a call back tomorrow to let us know what his best diagnosis is.

Just waiting for Monday so we can get her stitches out and lose the cone!

I am turning my dog into a suck. With all this uncertainty about what will happen with her I have been doing my best to enjoy the time we have together. I have given her lots of extra hugs and belly rubs in the last couple of weeks. Now she seems to always want to sit on my lap. If I am not petting her, she has her paws up on my leg looking at me with those little puppy dog eyes of hers. I don't want her to turn into a bad dog, but I also don't want to miss out on any opportunities to love her if her life is going to be cut short.

I am also finding that if there is anything slightly out of the ordinary with her, I think that she is starting to show signs of having cancer. When I picked her up from the Vet clinic on Thursday they gave me a little bottle of liquid medicine to give her once a day for five days. It is an anti-inflammatory that has to be taken with food or it might upset her stomach. Because Kiwi is more of a grazer when it comes to eating, it is hard to say when she will eat. So since Thursday evening I have been hand feeding her a bit of food each evening before it's time for her medicine. She has hardly eaten in the last couple of days but always eats just fine when I hand feed her. If you ask me, she is just picking up a bad habit from me. Also, this morning when she first woke up I put her out for a pee because she didn't want to pee before bed last night. She just whined to get back in right away, so I said, fine, if I need to let her out in the night I will. Didn't hear a peep from her during the night, but then she wouldn't go when I put her out this morning. So I waited an hour and tried again when she was less excited to get her morning kisses and play time in with us and she did #1 and #2 right away.

I think I feel more at ease about this whole thing. Yeah, waiting sort of stinks but we have done all we can up to this point and all there is left to do it just wait. I REALLY don't want to lose her. We have invested a lot of time, effort and money into her, not to mention the fact that we love her dearly. As I sit here, Kiwi has her paws up on my leg and is whining to get up. I think I'll tell her no for now.

Out of our hands

Kiwi is home :) She spent most of yesterday and today at the University vet clinic to prepare for and have three biopsies taken. She is mostly shaved on the lower half of her back, except for a black mohawk (a la Mr. T) right down the middle. In the notes they gave me when I picked her up it said that the lump on her left side is 7cm, the one on the right side is 5cm and the one on her back leg is 1cm. I hope she doesn't have the kind of cancer where they have to remove an additional 4cm of tissue around the tumour. I don't think there is that much Kiwi available to take... She did well though today and seems to be back to herself, albeit a somewhat dopier version.

It will be 5-7 days until we get the biopsy results back. There is nothing we can do but wait, pray and enjoy the time we have with our little poochie. It may be nothing, and I will whoop and holler for joy if that is the case. If it is something serious, well there is nothing we can do about it. Yes we will give our dog the treatment she needs, if it is going to be beneficial to her. But if it gets to a point where it is us holding on to a dog that we are too afraid to let go of, I am afraid we might just have to let go. I don't want to lose her, I really don't. But I don't want to psych myself up for a positive result then be devastated by something bad. I am trying to be realistic. I am doing my best to leave our sweet little Kiwi in God's hands :)

I must be getting old....

Up until a year or two ago I NEVER had to get up at night to use the washroom. I worked at Impark for 8 hour shifts with only one bathroom break during the day. I pretty much had a bladder of steel. In the last year or so I have had to get up usually just once per night to use the washroom. We have an en suite bathroom and up until a week or so ago I would use that one. Often when I needed to go, I would stumble my way, half asleep, to the toilet and not even turn on any lights or anything.

About a week or so ago in the morning Jay said to me, "why did you get up and use the other bathroom (the one in the hallway) last night?". I said, "I didn't". He said, "yes you did, I was awake when yo got up, and you left the bedroom door open when you came back." Sure enough, the bedroom door was open and I hadn't flushed the toilet in the other bathroom. I had absolutely NO recollection of getting up. Since then I have gone into that bathroom to 'go' at night at least every other night or so. The last few times I have no recollection of going into that bathroom, but I usually regain some sort of awareness when I am either sitting down or when I turn on the light. So weird.

Kiwi Update

I was going to write a blog update about our appointment at the University of Saskatchewan vet clinic this morning, however Jay beat me to it. Feel free to click on that link and read about our poochie. I miss her already. It is so quiet around here without her here. *sigh* Can't wait to pick her up tomorrow after work :)

Sarcasm

One of my favorite things in the whole world is going to the doctor once a year for a physical exam. Other than the overall physical discomfort of the whole thing, my very favorite part is when the office assistant leads you into the room and asks you to strip off all of your clothes (but you can leave your socks on, if you want, she says) and sit on the table with a paper vest on in place of a shirt, with your bottom half covered by a paper blanket. Then you get to sit there and sit there and sit there for at least a minimum of 20 minutes waiting for the doctor to come in and see you.

If it were a more perfect world we would all wear paper clothes each day, because first of all they are disposable (don't need to wash them)! And secondly they are INCREDIBLY warm and cozy. There is nothing like cuddling up on a cold winter's morning in a paper vest and a paper blanket. If there was a fireplace in the doctors office it would have been absolutely perfect. The most unfortunate part of this whole business is that I won't get to do this again for a whole YEAR!

Wedding time!

Tomorrow is Arleen's wedding. I am looking forward to it, even though it has been hard to with all the other stuff going on right now. We dropped Kiwi off last night at my mom and dad's house where she will be spoiled rotten while Jay and I are off at the wedding.

I have known Arleen since grade three. That is approximately 20 years. When you are only 28 that is a long friendship. I was talking with a co-worker the other day about different friendships. She mentioned a friend of hers who was high maintenance, who she had to call at least once a week or so, or the friend would start to think they weren't friends anymore. I would say Arleen is a low maintenance friend. She has been there all these years, even when she was away at Bible college for four years and when she was gone to Taiwan for a little over a year. We can still get together and talk and talk and talk like it hasn't been that long since we last visited. I am blessed to have such good friends in my life.

I wish Arleen and Arlen all the best as they start their lives as a married couple. If you would have asked me in high school, who would be married first, Karen, Arleen or myself, I definitely would have voted for Arleen. But she is the last to get married....and that is just fine. She has experienced a lot of things in her life and is quite the adventurer. I am glad she is marrying someone who is just as adventurous as her :)

My sweet little Kiwi

We have shed a lot of tears in the last couple of days. It is amazing how much a part of our family this little pup has become. I know I shouldn't feel sad, because Kiwi isn't sick, she is perfectly healthy and frisky and adorable. I would hate for her to get sick though.

Jay talked to the vet yesterday about our options. We had wondered what the advantage of removing part of the lump for analysis would be, versus just removing the whole thing and analyzing it. The vet agreed that it would probably be in Kiwi's best interest to only put her under anesthetic once, so we have decided to go with the full lump removal. At this point we have NO idea what this will cost, but we are prepared to do what we must for our little poochie. The vet did say that they do not feel that they have the expertise necessary to remove the lump at their office so would refer us to someone at the U of S vet clinic.

We have agreed that we will give her a full course of treatment and see how she does. Whether that involves giving our dog chemotherapy and radiation therapy for a while, as I said we will do what we need to do. I don't know that we would give her a second round of treatment if she were to get another tumor though. Of course at this point this is all speculation. For all we know, removing the tumor could be the end of it.

I know I shouldn't worry about this, but I am. My emotions are feeling very close to the surface these days. I find myself crying when people ask me how Kiwi is doing. These are people that have no idea that she has cancer, just asking how my pup is doing. And I break out in tears. *sigh* So I think if anyone asks me how she is doing I am just going to say 'fine' because I hate crying in front of other people.

Kiwi

Last Wednesday Kiwi was at the groomer's for her first haircut in almost three months. The groomer noticed a lump on her back. It is on her left side in front of her hip. The groomer recommended getting it checked out. I called last Wednesday and made an appointment for Kiwi to get checked out by the vet on Saturday morning. After talking to some friends whose dogs had also had lumps I felt pretty certain that it wasn't anything too serious. When I took her in on Saturday I just expected her to have the lump checked and to get her shots. The vet checked the lump and seemed quite concerned about it and said we would forgo the shots today and that we should plan to bring her back in for some x-rays and a fluid aspiration biopsy.

I took her in and left her for the day yesterday. At the end of the day when I picked her up they said the x-rays hadn't revealed anything and that they got a good amount of fluid out of the lump for analysis. We were told they would have the results for us within 24-48 hours. When I got home from work this evening there was a message on the machine from the vet. She called at 5:30pm when the clinic was just about to close. She said the results were in and that I could give her a call in the evening on her cell phone. I knew at that moment that it probably wasn't good news that she had.

I called her right away and she said that they had found cancer cells in her biopsy. She said that the next step was to determine what sort of cancer it is so they know how to treat it. The way they do that is to take blood tests and to put Kiwi out to take a piece of the lump for analysis. From there they may need to remove the lump or come up with some other sort of treatment.

Jay and I have already discussed our options.....I can't believe our little 15 month old dog has cancer. I totally thought it would be nothing....that it would just be a couple hundred dollars to find out that our little poochie was perfectly healthy, but just lumpy. Now I imagine all told this is going to cost us a couple of thousand dollars. *sigh* How do you put a price on the health of a loved one. I know she is just a dog, and we did decide at what point we would not bother with continuing treatment. She is still a young dog and could potentially live for another 15 years. We will do what we can, but I refuse to pay thousands of dollars over the years to pay for medications or crazy treatments. Kiwi seems absolutely perfectly healthy, she has no other symptoms. I don't want her to get sick, but man is it expensive. Should have invested in the pet health insurance....

Before and After (Are you sure that's Kiwi?)

I took both of these pictures today. It always baffles me, just how different Kiwi looks after a haircut. When she is shaved down you can see all her little black spots. I wonder if one of her distant relatives was a dalmatian?

Kiwi's new coat

Kiwi's first coat. I am not much of a person to dress my dog in clothes. But Kiwi is getting shaved down on Wednesday and since it's still pretty cold out I thought she might appreciate the extra warmth. I found it at Walmart and thought it was awfully cute :)